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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Your face, your voice, your fingerprint, your iris, all of these things cannot be spoofed and are uniquely yours and cannot be taken away from you.

And you can't take them away from other people, nor revoke them when they are "compromised". In particular for faces and voices, they can be used to identify you without your knowledge and consent. That means they can be used to discriminate against you on whatever basis the discriminator chooses. This may just be price discrimination, which is what people are concerned about in the retail context. Or it may be more extreme. You could use it to deny job applications or credit to anyone who'd been at a political demonstration filmed by police, for example.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/val-swain/disrupt...

We have enough trouble with the simple human-recognisable biometric classifier of "race" being used to discriminate against people.

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I agree with your comment. Yet tangentially those things can be taken away! At one point in several African countries they used finger prints for the ATM's. People suddenly started getting their fingers cut off by thieves. I would much rather give them a card then a part of my body.

Update: So I have been doing much Googling and can't find an accurate account of that happening. It appears there are some reports of it happening in Maylasia but that was for vehicles. Better yet is that in South Africa they are just blowing up the ATM's or ripping them outhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198626/South-Africa..., which honestly makes more sense.

I did see that Poland is pushing out some new ATM's, that are also used in Japan, that use the pattern of veins instead of finger prints. The state this means the finger has to be attached to the person

Have you got some sources for this? If you've got criminal gangs willing to cut people's fingers off for their money, why do they bother instead of doing something easier and more reliable? The threat of having your fingers cut off would, I expect, be all that's needed to get people to hand over their cash. Sure, not everyone has got cash on them right now, but not everyone has got an ATM card on them and not everyone has got any money in their bank account. Additionally, they seem to be not fingerprint scanners, but vein pattern scanners, and the manufacturers seem to say that a finger no longer attached to a body won't be accepted.

If you're willing to cut people's fingers off and then walk to the ATM, you'd be willing to simply rob people in some other much easier and much more reliable way.

It seems that about a year ago someone was considering such ATMs [1]. Are you sure this isn't just the fears of people (as mentioned in the article) blown into urban legend?

[1] http://www.news24.com/Technology/News/Fingerprint-ATMs-Will-...

Rational thieves, that's a new concept. Are you sure you haven't been overexposed to macroeconomics material recently?

As a single example, some burglars, when deciding which house to burgle, chooses the house that appear to be easiest to get into (poor physical security, no dogs, no alarms) and that will be easy to escape from (many of them open doors and windows as escape routes before they actually start the stealing). They pick ones that aren't hosting a party. They pick the ones that have concealed (or at least not overlooked) access.

Shoplifters - get this - will often wait until there isn't someone standing next to them before taking something off the shelf. Sounds like a good go at rationality to me.

Of course rational thieves exist. Not hyper-rational fictional models, but rational. The degree of rationality is a spectrum, as always, and is affected by physical and mental health and various other factors, but if you think rational thieves are a new concept, then you're living in some kind of fantasy world.

Most theft is fueled by desperation.

Desperate people do desperate things for small, or often no gain.

People are injured or killed all the time over possessions they may or may not have on them.

Price discrimination? Denying credit? Sure, but there are far worse things to worry about.

How many people have escaped genocides with fake passports, or fake laissez-passer?

Worry that biometric will make it harder to escape being sent to the gulag, not that Walmart will deny you store credit.

You can, of course, worry about both.

Well, I was trying to give plausible first-world examples of the top of the slippery slope, because people might readily dismiss arguments about genocide as hyperbole.

I'm reminded of https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/IBM.h...

In some ways we have the reverse situation prevailing; people are successfully escaping the genocidal collapse of the middle east into Europe, but are under threat of deportation by increasingly determined immigration enforcement.

> Price discrimination? Denying credit? Sure, but there are far worse things to worry about.

pjc50 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9705558) says exactly that:

> This may just be price discrimination, which is what people are concerned about in the retail context. Or it may be more extreme. You could use it to deny job applications or credit to anyone who'd been at a political demonstration filmed by police, for example.

You have already many tags on your clothes that can be linked to you credit card and then to you.

Mine just has washing instructions, not a unique identifier.

They are hidden in many expensive clothes.

http://beforeitsnews.com/christian-news/2014/01/use-cash-tra...

Wow those are some tags. The ones I dealt with (programming a portal scanner for WalMart) were the size of chips - would fit on your little fingernail. That article shows ginormous strips of plastic that would choke a badger.

I microwave my clothes.

What we need is more pervasive control of discrimination, then, and of other things that could use biometric information.

Simply "hiding" your biometrics or banning biometric identification altogether would be moving backwards in the bigger picture, which I'd compare to forbidding evolution research because it's against religious teaching.

pervasive control of discrimination

The US equal protection clause dates from 1868, and yet not just racism but actually unequal law enforcement is still widespread.

Unfortunately that “control of discrimination” can change uncontrollably in the future so any system we develop now should have some thought to the risks of leaving data which could be abused by a bad actor in the future.

The BackStory podcast had a recent episode on the history of surveillance in America:

http://backstoryradio.org/shows/keeping-tabs-2/

Among other topics, one segment discussed how a racist official in Virginia used data collected in the 19th century to protect free African Americans as part of his effort to enforce racial purity laws in the 20th century:

“HELEN ROUNTREE: In the county courthouses, there was another kind of record made, and that was the register of free Negroes. He had to get a certificate stating that they were of free birth, otherwise they could be kidnapped and sold into slavery.

The law about that went in in 1806. Plecker was able to get copies of those registers – every county had one. And then if he got a tip later and he could have his people trace geologically back to a free negro register, he had that present-day person as a person of African ancestry.”

The full segment is worth listening to:

https://soundcloud.com/backstory/one-data-point-one-drop

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